


Above, but undermined

by lloydsglasses



Category: Daredevil (TV), Jessica Jones (TV), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Blind Character, Friendship, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, Matt and Jessica are basically reluctant besties and everything is right with the world, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-20
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-17 18:15:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11856963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lloydsglasses/pseuds/lloydsglasses
Summary: “Do you actually need the stick?” she asks abruptly, shoving her hands inside the pockets of her jacket.Matt raises what she thinks might be an unimpressed eyebrow – it’s sort of hard to tell with the glasses. “You know I’m blind, right?”





	Above, but undermined

**Author's Note:**

> A sort of bridge between the scenes in episode 6 where Matt and Jessica are in Matt's flat, and then when they're walking to talk to the architect's family.

She watches him closely as they make their way out of his apartment and down onto the street. His cane taps rhythmically against the floor and she wonders why he bothers with it when he doesn’t need to. Or maybe he does; how the hell would Jessica know? She still isn’t entirely sure how his powers work.

“Do you actually need the stick?” she asks abruptly, shoving her hands inside the pockets of her jacket.

Matt raises what she thinks might be an unimpressed eyebrow – it’s sort of hard to tell with the glasses. “You know I’m blind, right?”

“You know I’ve seen that whole psychic ninja act you like to pull, right?”

His face closes off completely, head twitching to one side. Jessica rolls her eyes. “Oh, relax. Nobody’s paying attention to us.”

He doesn’t relax, but that’s hardly a surprise. From what she’s seen, Matt Murdock doesn’t do relaxed.

“I’m not psychic,” he says eventually.

Jessica snorts, noting that he didn’t bother to deny the bit about being a ninja. “Well, from where I’m standing it sounds like a pretty good descriptor. How else do you explain being able to sense people’s heartbeats?”

“I don’t just _sense_ them, I…” He pauses, wetting his lips and taking a breath. “I can hear things.”

She shoots him a disbelieving look. “Like neon?”

Matt coughs, then shrugs. Jessica stares at him, suddenly aware that he’s completely serious. After a moment she manages to recover.

“You know that saying stuff like that usually makes people think you’re mentally unstable?”

His lips quirk up into a grin. “All the same, it’s true. My hearing’s more… attuned than most people’s. Smell too. And taste. Basically everything that doesn’t involve my eyes.”

 _Huh._ Well, at the very least that explains how he was able to follow her so well the other day.

“Even though my other senses are heightened, I still need the cane,” Matt says quietly, and Jessica remembers what she’d been trying to ask in the first place. “It can be harder in crowds, or on the street. Some days there’s just too much to process.”

She glances at him in surprise. Jessica isn’t good at much, but she _is_ good at people. From what she can tell, Matt’s more of a closed book than a heart-on-his-sleeve kind of guy. He’s definitely not the kind of person to freely admit his weaknesses. And yet for some reason he’s choosing to share a part of himself with her.

“That sounds like it must suck,” mutters Jessica, at a lack for anything else to say. She isn’t really sure how to deal with his sudden honesty, or if she even wants to deal with it. Matt just shrugs, and for a few moments the two of them walk along in silence.

“What about you?” he asks, after a while.

“What about me?”

“When I was following you the other day I kept losing track of where you were. It was like your footsteps would just stop and then you’d be gone. How’d you do that?”

Jessica pulls a face. Collectively they’ve learned a lot of dumb things over the past few days and she really doesn’t want to add another to the pile. But then, Matt’s just made an effort to be honest with her, and if they’re going to fight together they should probably know each other’s skills anyway.

“I can kind of… fly,” she says reluctantly, wishing she had something more believable to offer. There’s a stunned pause where Matt doesn’t say anything. And then–

“You know that saying stuff like that usually makes people think you’re mentally unstable?”

Jessica looks over at him, sees that grin pulling at his lips. She snorts again in amusement. “I never claimed not to be.”

They round a corner and a row of familiar looking brownstones emerges into Jessica’s field of vision. 

“Come on,” she says, heading forwards towards where she thinks the architect’s wife and daughter live. “I think it’s up here.”

**Author's Note:**

> Still working on my Doctor Who fics but OMG the Defenders was fab and the whole Matt & Jessica dynamic is just everything I ever wanted in life and I couldn't not write about it omg I love them <3


End file.
